


The Power and the Other Thing

by Mosca



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Buffy Wishverse, F/F, Vampire Willow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 10:02:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Wishverse, all the destinies are different, and Willow's is to defeat Glorificus. For Wolfram & Hart, her death is only a minor inconvenience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Power and the Other Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for canon-typical violence, including deaths of a redshirt and several characters who also die in canon. 
> 
> Undying thanks to Distraction, Vassilissa, and Sandyk for beta reading.
> 
> This story was recently nominated by the Willowy Goodness Awards for Best Willow Story Ever, an honor that blows me away with its sheer awesomeness.
> 
> I wrote this for the Willowficathon for cdybedahl and originally posted it to my Livejournal in May 2004.

Willow came back in a candle-filled room that smelled like sage, incense, and basement. She remembered dying: she'd done it twice. Once in Jesse's arms, his teeth tearing her neck, the sweet oblivion of oxygen deprivation. The second time with her back against the cage in the school library, at the business end of a stake. She'd felt her fingers turn to dust and assumed that would be the last of her.

She came back naked, but somebody draped a blanket over her immediately and told her not to be afraid. She hadn't been afraid, only confused. Confused and hungry. Not for blood, either, but in the good old-fashioned "I could use a cheeseburger" way. She checked for her own pulse and found it.

A man in a suit came over to her and placed a pile of clothes at her side. Underwear, a dress, sandals. And modesty, all of a sudden, like he'd put that on top of the pile. Clutching the blanket around her, she pulled the clothes underneath and tried to remember how to get dressed summer-camp style, in a room full of people. "Put those on," the man said, "and we'll go upstairs."

"I'm alive," she said. She wriggled into the dress and shrugged away the blanket. The man in the suit was waiting by a door at the other end of the room.

"And I'm Lindsey," he said.

"Willow," she said. She brushed a lock of hair back from her face; it was long, the way it had been before she got vamped. Frumpy little girl hair. Was she going to have to be that again? The funny thing was, she wasn't sure she didn't want to be.

She followed Lindsey into an elevator, and then into another elevator, and then down a long beige hallway into a conference room. There was nobody in the room except a leggy woman with impeccable makeup, who leaned back in the chair at the head of the table. "Willow," the woman said, like she was a long-lost friend. "So glad you could join us."

"*You*" brought me here," Willow said. "On purpose."

"Yes, we did," the woman said. "You're very powerful."

"Not like _this,"_ I'm not."

"We brought you back exactly how we wanted you," the woman said. "Besides, bringing a human back, soul intact? A little chanting, a little blood sacrifice, no big deal. Summoning back the demon side of a vampire is a lot trickier."

"So if I went out tonight and got myself bitten, you wouldn't try to stop me?"

"We'd stop you," the woman said.

Willow decided not to press the issue. She had no teeth and no cash, and whatever this place was, it looked like it had plenty of both. "I'm more useful to you alive," she said.

"If you were useful to us dead, you would have stayed that way," the woman said. "Come on, let's get you something to eat." 

The woman didn't tell Willow her name until Willow was most of the way through a cheeseburger and fries. Her name was Lilah, and she was a lawyer. Because officially, a law firm was responsible for this whole thing with the not being dead anymore.

"Technically, you're still sixteen," Lilah said, "so you'll be staying in my spare bedroom until we can find a more permanent arrangement."

*

She woke up two days later. That's what Lilah told her when she shuffled into the kitchen seeking cereal: it was three in the afternoon on a Thursday, and she'd gone to bed at around nine on a Tuesday evening. There was a whole Wednesday of her life that was gone forever, and life was way too short to lose entire weekdays. 

"Pretty impressive, actually," Lilah said, not offering to pour corn flakes. "The texts all said you'd be out of it for a few _weeks._ And look at you. Two days."

"I killed people," Willow said. She'd spent all of Wednesday dreaming about them: their terrified eyes, the way their blood tasted. How many she'd snapped the necks of and left to rot, for the thrill of watching their souls fade and escape. 

She couldn't remember most of the faces, which was scary, but the scariest were the ones she'd known first. She'd left her mom in a pool of blood in the upstairs bathroom and torn up one of those stupid feminist pairing manuals on top of her. She'd kicked Percy from the basketball team in the face twenty-seven times before she'd drained him, so he wouldn't be cute when she killed him. And Xander, the worst: he'd begged her to let him die, but she'd shoved his face into her open vein. She'd made him love her, but it hadn't counted.

It might have made her feel better if those memories nauseated her, but they just seemed far away. That was a whole different girl. There was no blood lust left in her, just a grumbly stomach.

Willow had a bowl of cornflakes, but there was no milk in the fridge. She grimaced. There was orange juice, with a sell-by date of sometime in the next millennium. Or possibly not. "What year is it?" Willow said.

"2000," Lilah said.

"I woke up in the year 2000," Willow said. "That's kind of - did I miss a lot?"

"Nothing big," Lilah said.

"Good," Willow said.

"Two days," Lilah said. "You know what that means?"

"I'm powerful?" Willow said dryly. She was contemplating whether dry cornflakes were more disgusting than orange-juice-soaked cornflakes. And then marveling at how long it had been since she'd eaten cereal at all. 

"It means you're the right girl, and we can go shopping on the firm's tab."

"Do they pay for milk?" she muttered. 

All afternoon, until the mall closed, it was as much as she wanted of whatever she wanted. Willow felt like she was disappointing Lilah somehow, not being all that enthusiastic, but she wasn't good at malls: all those choices that trapped people into a specific personality. Willow'd had two that she remembered, and she had the feeling that she wasn't either of those people anymore. Bustiers and black lace would just make her look like the little poseurs who hung out at Hot Topic, and the prospect of jumpers and Mary Janes, or that mirror self with the fuzzy pink sweaters, made her want to vomit. She bought a lot of black, because it seemed noncommittal. She'd look like a rain cloud skulking through pastel California, but she'd always match.

She tried on every shade of lipstick at The Body Shop, and none of them made sense anymore. She settled on dark red, telling herself that it would stupid to leave empty-handed after all that work. She fingered her long, boring hair and asked Lilah, "Can I get it cut?" Ten minutes later, she was in an adjustable chair, asking the scissors-wielding aspiring actress for short, no bangs, extremely red.

On the way home, they stopped at Ralph's. Choosing a carton from the dairy case, she caught her reflection in the glass door. That was her, the girl with the 2%.

*

She was ready for whatever she was supposed to be developing powers for, but every day when Lilah came home from work, it was blah blah, lasting effects of the resuscitation spell, anything interesting happening on General Hospital? She had a key to the apartment and could come and go as she pleased, but there was nowhere to go. No public transportation and nothing in walking distance, just apartment complexes and townhouses. She could just make it to Ralph's without exhausting herself, and that involved dashing across an eight-lane street while flipping off drivers who acted like they'd never seen a pedestrian before. Still, there was some novelty in walking in the sunshine, so she mapped out Lilah's neighborhood with her feet.

There were a few weeks of this, maybe a month. It was hard to follow the rhythm of days and nights when her body didn't care whether the sun was out. And then, when she'd begun to adopt the resigned pacing of a zoo tiger, Lilah announced that she would start school the next day. Private tutors. Anything Willow wanted to learn, plus a few things Wolfram & Hart wanted to teach her. "Can I have driving lessons?" Willow said.

She got those, first thing every morning. Her parents had insisted she wait for summer vacation to get her driver's license, but she hadn't made it through sophomore year. She knew almost instantly that she'd be a terrible driver, but that didn't matter - she liked controlling such a powerful thing, being able to fly when traffic permitted.

Her other tutors were worth getting up for in the morning, too. They taught her school subjects, but at the level she was actually at. She had a whole class in advanced physics, and another one where she was doing trigonometry now but was promised differential equations by February. Her programming tutor was teaching her to hack using Javascript, and her English tutor pretty much gave her books to read and then made her discuss them for an hour. She remembered wishing, when she'd been alive for the first time, that school could just be eight hours of learning, without the pep rallies and the cliques and the humiliation of lunch period. A tiny part of her wondered if that wish had come true because she'd wished it.

And in the afternoon, she did magic. These tutors were all permanent employees of Wolfram & Hart, not grad students they'd contracted out. They offered no explanation of her lofty mission, but she knew as soon as she was told to turn to page four of Elementary Spells and Charms that this was how she was going to be powerful. If her powers only extended to levitating pencils, it would be pretty pathetic, but it didn't seem likely that Wolfram & Hart would revive her just to have someone to perform party tricks.

She learned to take integrals, and make little balls of light, and say things about F. Scott Fitzgerald that made her English tutor steeple his fingers and smile. She passed her driving test on the second try, and she was almost surprised to see that the picture on her license wasn't of an empty chair where a girl used to be. She'd written down her old birthdate, not thinking about it, but she realized that it was a good thing, being nineteen on paper. Even if she wished she could wash those years out of her mind, be that invisible, innocent girl.

Lilah's parenting philosophy ran mostly to paying Willow's credit card bills and bringing home enough takeout for both of them on the days when she didn't work past dinnertime. It was more quality time than Willow had spent with her real family. Even when Lindsey gave her a car of her own, as a reward for passing the tests, Willow tried to be home for dinner. Lilah only gave a shit because she was paid to, but any reason was better than not giving a shit at all. Besides, she was more intelligent than most people, and she didn't insist on talking when there was nothing to say. Willow could appreciate her, if not quite admit to liking her.

With the car, there were more places to go, although most of them were boring. She went out to a few nightclubs, the kind that had excited her when she was a vampire, but the humans were just stupid, self-centered people, not food. She hated most of the music, and she was a terrible dancer.

So she found a coffee shop that made good lattes and ice cream sundaes, where they were open late and left her alone to read about string theory or binding spells. There were other regulars, mostly pleasant and unobtrusive: Steve with the Converse high-tops and the headphones; Laurie with the multicolored hair and the feminist flyers; Tara with the long skirts and the thick books about Native American spirituality. She liked being able to smile at them when she saw them and then ignore them completely.

There was another regular who she enjoyed less. His name was Ben, and he was way too friendly. At first, she thought he was coming by to tell the sullen girl the good news about Jesus, but no, he was just really nice. And thought, apparently, that if he was persistent enough, she would stop blowing him off and love him forever.

She saw him as she came in and brought her coffee and backpack over to Tara's table. "Do you mind if I sit?" she said. "There's this guy I'm trying to avoid."

"Um, uh, sure," Tara said. She'd parted her hair in zigzags, and it made her look less granola-by-numbers. Pretty, even, maybe, with those huge baby-deer eyes.

Willow sat for a while, sipping coffee and pretending to read sample Perl programs, mostly thinking about the flyaway topology of Tara's hair.

"So, um, you... do magic?" Tara said. "Because I - um - I noticed you reading a book about it. A - a real one, not like you'd get in the New Age section at Barnes & Noble. And I - I - I guess you didn't - didn't actually want to talk to me, so, um..."

"I do magic," Willow said. "And sometimes computers." And sometimes girls, she added in her mind. Tara didn't seem like the kind who would take to the offer of a one-night stand. But that was good, because Willow thought she might not be that kind of girl anymore. 

"Me - me too," Tara said. "Magic. Since I was little, with my mom. Computers... uh, the guy in the UCLA tech support center showed me how to use my e-mail, and - and that's all - all I know."

"They're not all that different," Willow said. "If you're really specific about what you want, you pretty much get it, and if not - well, kaboom."

"Do you - do you - I'm, um, looking for a coven. I - I - I tried the college Wiccan group, but they're mostly into bake sales and ar-arguing over what kind of drinks to serve at the Samhain mixer."

Willow laughed. "I'm mostly a solo practitioner. I've got someone teaching me."

"M-maybe we could do a spell together sometime," Tara said. "L-like something that's - that's easier with two people."

"Maybe," Willow said, but she tore a sheet of paper out of her notebook, and they traded phone numbers. That was the kind of girl she was now.

*

The only unusual thing about the day they assigned Willow a bodyguard was that it was cold out. Not just cold for California, but teeth-chattering cold, like the Snow Queen had decided she'd had enough of Narnia and hopped through the wardrobe to try and break into movies. Willow bought a black leather jacket and a scarf, wine-colored with flecks of white, that kept unwinding itself from her neck and trailing towards the floor.

Lindsey was there to meet her after History of Magic, and he brought her upstairs to his office. Sitting on Lindsey's sofa was a big black guy, so immersed in the cleaning of a long knife that he didn't look up when they walked in. "Willow Rosenberg, meet Charles Gunn," Lindsey said.

Charles didn't get up, but he met Willow's eyes. There was something dead and yellowish in his. "Vampire?" she said.

"Reformed," he said. "As long as they pay me, I'm off the human blood."

"How do you stand it?" she said. "I mean, the taste alone."

"I moved out of the sewer, bought myself a new ride, and got the hell over it," he said. "Anything I need to know about?"

"Other than the creepy guy at the coffeehouse?" she said.

"There have been some... close calls," Lindsey said. "Things we didn't want to frighten you with."

"Close calls?" she said. "You don't want me to be _frightened,_ so you don't tell me anything, except that maybe somebody might want to kill me? Again? No. I want to know why I'm here, and I'm - I'm not leaving until somebody tells me. Okay, no, actually, if you don't tell me, I'm going to Lilah's and going to bed, and I'm not getting out to study any more magic until I know why I'm learning it in the first place."

"Gunn," Lindsey said affectlessly, "step out."

She stood there with her arms folded and waited for Lindsey to start talking.

"There's a very powerful goddess," he said. "Called Glorificus. She's loose, and she's destructive. There's been an epidemic of sudden-onset paranoid schizophrenia that we can link to her. Fortunately, we know what she's after, and she'll never get to it."

"Let me guess," Willow said. "I'm supposed to stop her somehow."

"You're going to figure out how to destroy her," Lindsey said. 

"Well, I'll do my best," she said snidely, "but-"

"You're going to," he said. "There's a prophecy. One so clear that when our experts read it, they right away set about finding the way to bring you back to life."

"And how am I supposed to destroy this... god?" Willow said.

"Not a clue," Lindsey said.

*

When she got home - back to Lilah's, but it was hard to deny the home-ness that the place had developed - she opened up the file on Glorificus. There were pictures of an undeniably hot blonde; Wolfram & Hart were pretty sure that was her current form. She had demon minions, which the firm's army of darkness was systematically massacring. The rest was mostly speculation: Glorificus seemed to be invincibly powerful in this dimension, but her power seemed to fluctuate, to feed off of something. The rash of insanity? The firm's experts had considered the possibility, but nobody had seen it happen. 

If Glorificus had a weakness, it was that she seemed to be bound to this dimension. But that was also a liability: attempts to banish her back to her home dimension had failed.

"Invincibly powerful," Willow said. "Damn it." She was going to die again, and it wasn't going to be long until she did.

What do you do if you don't have long to live? You call the girl who gave you her phone number, get her to invite you to her weird student apartment that smells like patchouli and cat. The cat belonged to Tara's roommate, she said, but the patchouli was hers. Tara had a few spells marked in the book she'd been reading: "I didn't think - didn't think you'd call, but I, um, I was optimistic anyway."

She wanted to make a contained flame. It was easy to make fire but hard to control it, to make it burn the magic and not the furniture. "Should be easier if one of us works on the fire and the other one makes the bubble to hold it in," Willow said.

So they drew a chalk circle on the hardwood floor and joined hands around it. Tara made a tiny greenish flame, and Willow made invisible glass to surround it. The flame leaped in its prison, changed colors, threw sparks that went out violently when they hit the glass. As the fire grew angrier, it got harder to hold it in: not so hard that Willow was straining, but she felt like the last quarter of a gym-class mile, when the endorphins kicked in.

"I can't put it out," Tara said.

Willow squeezed Tara's hand and filled the glass box with water. The fire fizzled. She turned the glass a pale, striated purple, and the water flowed gently within the box as it settled on the floor. "Keep it," Willow said.

"It's beautiful," Tara said.

"So're you," Willow decided to say. And kissed her, because if she died tomorrow, she wanted to have kissed someone the day before. "Call me if you want to do another spell," she said before she left.

"If you want to contain a fire," she said to herself as she drove home, "put it in a box so it can't escape. If you want to put it out, fill the box with water." She chewed the words, rolled them around with her kiss-filled tongue, sang them along with the radio.

*

"I've got a question for you," Willow said to her physics tutor that Monday. Willow's physics tutor was a grad student from USC, stick-thin and mousy, with a Texas accent that could have peeled drywall. She looked about fourteen years old and hid behind strands of her hair like someone even younger. She was also probably the only one of Willow's tutors that was actually smarter than Willow, if only about the one thing.

"What do you know about Many Worlds Theory?" Willow said.

"That's... I think there's a paragraph or two on it in one of the chapters we haven't gotten to yet," Fred said. "Do you want to skip to that?"

"I read what's in the book," Willow said. "I want to know what _you_ know."

"It's - it's not really my field of research," Fred said.

"But I've been trying to build a universe in the basement," Willow said, painting her voice with the sweetness she'd used to lure victims with. Information was like a victim now. "I've been trying for a while, and I can't figure out why it won't work."

Fred laughed, and Willow laughed at the fact that Fred thought she was joking. Fred said, "Controversial theory, says that for every event with more than one possible outcome, every outcome occurs. Except that since contradictory outcomes can't occur simultaneously, they kind of... make different universes for themselves so they can both happen. So there's all these new universes being made all the time. It's all pretty Star Trek."

"But plausible," Willow said.

"It solves some problems," Fred said, "and raises others. What if I'd gone to that party, or asked that guy out? What if Hitler won? What if I'd kept driving instead of helping that lady with her flat tire, and not gotten fired from my job for being late? What if the coin I flipped came up tails instead of heads? What if there weren't any shrimp? It's every single event with multiple possible outcomes," Fred said. "Except that, um, some theorists think that, like a lot of phenomena, a given offshoot universe's properties don't fully manifest themselves until that universe is observed. And you can't - you can't observe a universe you're not in. I mean, there's been some stuff with photon paths, but not after that moment."

"Maybe there's a spell for that," Willow said. "There's spells for seeing across space, and through barriers, so -"

"Like in a story?" Fred said, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. "Because that would be a good story, using some kind of magic to demonstrate scientific theories."

"No, as in using actual magic to - You really don't have any idea what you're here for, do you? Who you work for."

"I was - I thought - all they said was, they needed someone to teach physics," Fred said. "My stipend's kind of low, and -"

"I don't care what they said," Willow said. "This is what's going on." It took a few minutes and a floating pencil for Fred to start believing that this wasn't a fairy tale or a nightmare, but after that, she was asking all the right questions.

*

Willow had planned to wait until Tara called her, but Tara didn't call for almost a week. Willow's mind kept going back to the fragility of her lips when they'd kissed, and the power in her hands when they'd made the fire. If she didn't call, the maybe-relationship was going to die of shyness. It was too soon for another spell, though. Too much intensity. She invited Tara to meet her at the coffee shop instead.

She bought Tara coffee and sat reaching across the table, letting Tara play with her fingers. "You should have little streaks of pink in your hair," Willow said.

"It'd - it'd be too much," Tara said.

"It's how I see you when I close my eyes," Willow said.

"Then maybe - maybe I will," said Tara, and Ben was standing over them with that missionary grin on his face.

"Hi," he said.

Tara said hi back, but Willow just stared at the spot on his forehead where his third eye would be if he'd had one.

"Sorry," he said. "If I'd known you guys were an item, I would have -"

"You should probably go away now," Willow said.

Sweat beaded in his third-eye place, and he whispered, "No. Not now." He dashed out of the coffee shop like he was in the thrall of something. 

Willow hadn't felt the magic well up warm inside her: had it become so easy that she could control people without feeling it? She was so lost in her panic that she didn't notice Charles until Tara mentioned that there was a guy standing over her. "This is my - my friend, Charles," she said hurriedly. "Charles, this is my, um, friend. Tara."

"Can I talk to you outside for a minute?" Charles said. 

He took her to the alley behind the coffee shop, and for a minute she thought he was going to turn vamp-face and bite her. Instead, he said, "What does Glorificus look like?"

"I've never actually seen her," Willow said, "but from the pictures, um, little and blonde, kind of weird eyes. Do you think you saw her somewhere?"

"I think I just saw your amateur stalker turn _into_ her," he said.

"What do you mean, turned into?"

"I mean," Charles said, "he sat down behind that dumpster, and when he got up, he was the girl from those pictures."

"So Ben _is_ Glorificus?"

"Kind of," Charles said. "He smells completely human, which the girl... doesn't. He might not even know his body's a timeshare."

"So, wait. You saw Glorificus come out from behind the dumpster," Willow said. "Where was she before?"

"Ain't you listening?" he said. "Before, she was Ben. And then she _became_ Glorificus."

"Ben is Glorificus?" she said.

"And Glorificus is Ben," he said.

She stopped to get her head around the idea, but the more she thought, the more she felt it slip away. "So Glorificus just... appeared out of nowhere?"

"Shit," Charles said, "she's got some kind of mind wipe going on." He furrowed his brow, and Willow had no idea what he was talking about. He said, "Do you have a pen?"

She pulled out the ballpoint she kept in her jacket pocket. "Here," she said. "Give it back when you're done."

"Give me your arm," he said. When she hesitated, he said, "Not gonna hurt you. There's something you have to not forget." She held her arm out. He pushed up the sleeve and started writing on the inside of her forearm. When he finished, he capped the pen and handed it back to her.

The inside of her wrist now said, "BEN IS GLORY AND GLORY IS BEN." Which was weird, but it made sense that Glorificus would be infesting a human body. Unable to escape it, maybe.

"I didn't know how to spell Glorificus," Charles said.

"I like Glory better," Willow said. "I think it fits her."

"Now," Charles said, "I need you to promise me two things. First, I need you to promise that you will make those words permanent: magic, tattoo, don't care as long as they stay there. Second, promise me that if you get confused, if things stop making sense, you will read your arm."

She promised, already forgetting why she was doing it. By the time she got back to the table where Tara was waiting, she couldn't remember what was written on her arm or why it was important, only that she needed Tara to seal the ink into her skin before it washed away. "Can we... sit in my car for a minute, or something?" Willow said.

"Don't you want - want to finish your coffee?" Tara said.

"This is important," Willow said. "More important than that." 

Tara looked afraid all the way to Willow's car, afraid as she sat down in the passenger seat. Willow remembered seeing that fear in a hundred girls' eyes, right before she'd killed them. It made her shiver, the thought that she could still be capable of that. "I'm sorry," she started.

"It's - it's fine," Tara said.

"Do you know a spell for making things permanent?" Willow said. "Like a tattoo."

"There's... one I think would - would work for that."

Willow showed Tara her arm, and Tara jerked back.

"Wh- why would you want to tattoo that?" Tara said.

"Because I keep forgetting," Willow said. "We _all_ keep forgetting." Tara still looked stricken. Willow read the words again. "And that looks pretty freakish, if you don't know the context. So, okay, context." 

It seemed like a ruthless act of defiance, telling all these people about something so secret that Wolfram & Hart had waited months to tell _her,_ but she couldn't convince herself that she was wrong to do it. Alone, she was a weak little human girl. She needed backup. From Fred, with the scary-quick brain, and from Charles, with the vampire strength. And from Tara, who knew restraint.

"So there are - there are real demons?" Tara said. "Because - because I thought they were all made up. To scare people. To keep them from doing stuff."

"It's real," Willow said. "All of it. I think. Maybe not leprechauns."

"But - but I'm not," Tara said. "I'm not a demon."

"I think you'd know," Willow said. "The slime and the horns and stuff."

"It's why I left - why I went to L. A.," Tara said. "B-because I thought - but I'm not. I'm just a girl."

"Not just," Willow said and gave her the kind of kiss she'd used to dream about in French class: their lips just touching, the energy running between them.

"Do you... still want me to do that spell?" Tara said.

"Probably should," Willow said.

Tara put three fingers on Willow's arm, where the words were, and incanted softly in a language that Willow didn't know yet. Willow's skin glowed and burned, a soft yellow light, a heat like seeing how close she could get her hand to the eighth night of Chanukah candles. The letters got thicker, changed shape but said the same thing.

"It's in my handwriting now," was the first thing Tara said when the glow subsided.

Willow didn't know how to thank her, so she decided to learn all about making out in cars. Tara's lips were warm with magic words, and Willow was going to save the world.

*

"Interesting tattoo," was the first thing Willow's History of Magic tutor said when she put her books down. "Discovered something so important you have to wear it wherever you go, then?"

Mr. Wyndam-Pryce had a cold Vincent Price accent that made everything sound like a warning of impending doom, and he always smelled at least faintly of stale Scotch. This made him the least annoying of her magic teachers: Spell Casting was really into weird tea and finding Willow's chakra; Potions made bad puns and always had a bra strap showing; and Languages overwhelmed her with the desire to nap. She could at least count on Mr. Wyndam-Pryce to show her old woodcuts of ooky demons that weren't part of the curriculum, or get really excited about a narrowly-thwarted eighth-century apocalypse. He knew a lot of things, and he enjoyed knowing them, and he seemed to get a thrill from her appreciation of this that was only slightly inappropriate.

"Is Glory short for Glorificus?" he said. "Because it's more than a little disturbing that you've given your adversary a pet name."

"They told you?" she said.

"Told me what?" he said.

"About how I'm supposed to destroy Glorificus," she said. "Apparently that's some kind of very special secret."

" _Told_ me?" he said, with a bitter laugh. "Dear girl, I'm the one who discovered the prophecy that said you would." He took off his glasses and fixed his unblinking eyes to hers. "And you will."

"Yeah," she said. "I heard."

"The tattoo," he said, "is part of your plan, then?" He put his glasses back on. "You _do_ have a plan, don't you?"

She had a plan, right? The thing she had, with the universe and the trapping Ben in it, it counted as a plan. "Yeah."

"Well, I can't imagine you'd need my help, but -"

She considered the fact that when she'd asked her Spell Casting tutor about making universes, she'd spent the remaining hour doing breathing exercises, and said, "You know, I might."

He listened to her with an expression of deep concentration under his uneven five o'clock shadow, and then he took her to the Wolfram & Hart library. "I'm certain it's been done before," he said. "In the thirteenth century: I think it was the way they finally vanquished Eleanor of Aquitaine. At the time, they didn't have your physics behind it, but..." He selected a book from the shelf, and its pages were blank for a moment before he said a title, and they filled with text. In Latin. Not so useful. He skimmed, muttering, until she was almost ready to wander off, see if one of those books would give her _Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH._ And if she'd still love it, a couple of deaths since she'd last re-read it.

"Aha!" Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said, and he scurried away with the book. She was 25 pages into The Rats of NIMH when he came back, handing her a photocopy with a block of highlighted words. "There are quite a lot of release forms involved in copying ancient texts," he said.

They went back to the office Lindsey had set aside for her lessons, and Mr. Wyndam-Pryce coached her in Latin pronunciation until she got restless. "Why do you work here?" she said. She didn't know why she needed so badly to bait him.

"I had nowhere else to go," he said. "With Sunnydale as - as you saw, and - I was fired from the Watcher's Council for failing to prevent the unpreventable. Wolfram & Hart thought my skills would be of use to them."

She didn't know quite what he was talking about, but she got the idea: some powerful group of people, like Wolfram & Hart, and they'd kicked him out. "But it's killing you," she said.

"Working for a multidimensional organization designed to perpetuate evil?" he said. "Yes, I suppose it is."

"Evil?" she said. All the power, the money, the vampire employees - she should have guessed. And what she was fighting: a god, not a demon.

"Well," he said. "Of course. You wouldn't have known."

"So I shouldn't fight her," Willow said. "I should - I should - get out of town, or something. If I'm going to be good. Is that right?"

"No," Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said. "Glorificus is beyond - if she succeeds, she will destroy not only this entire dimension, but many others, possibly all of them. That level of destruction goes beyond our concepts of good and evil."

"It's been a long time since I've been good, anyway," she said. 

"You will be," he said. "That's how it's written."

*

Lilah got home on time that night, with heaps of Chinese food and some DVDs from Blockbuster. Great timing for a bonding night, Willow thought as she sulked her way through a carton of orange chicken and a movie she wasn't paying attention to. "What's going on?" Lilah finally said. "And don't give me any of that teen angst bullshit. I don't think you're really that kind of kid. You don't have it in you."

"Nothing," Willow said automatically.

"Remember what I just said about bullshit?" Lilah said. "And if it's about that girl you've been going out with, there's no problem. I ran a background check. Kind of a weird family, but she's all right. You have my blessing."

"Totally the wrong source of anxiety," Willow said.

"I'm going to keep bugging you," Lilah said, "until you tell me. I'm extremely patient and well-versed in interrogation techniques that you really don't want me to demonstrate on you. 'Fess up."

"Well, for one thing. It would have been nice to know ahead of time that I was working for the forces of evil."

"We... were trying to minimize the impact of that," Lilah said.

"So, are you?" Willow said. "Evil? Because, still gonna face my destiny, but if so? Not doing it for Wolfram & Hart."

"Me, personally?" Lilah said. "Or the organization as a whole?"

"Doesn't matter."

"The firm -" Lilah said. "In the past, we had the luxury of catering to whoever could pay, and yes, evil pays. but these days - well, you've seen Sunnydale. We're pretty much holding the line. Not out of any sense of altruism, but if there's no Los Angeles, we've failed. It's not a question of sides anymore."

"So, mostly evil," Willow said. "What about you?"

"I don't take sides, either," Lilah said.

Willow wanted to call Lilah on that. Having the nerve to declare this a bullshit-free zone, then hurling it at her. There was no such thing as not taking sides. Ever since she'd known there _were_ sides, she'd never seen a way around choosing one. Either you served the Master, or you fought him. "You have to," Willow said, "or you die."

"I've survived this long," Lilah said. "And I'll probably outlive all the idiots blindly serving demon masters _and_ all the ones blindly fighting them. I do what I can justify to myself. I say 'no' a lot more than I say 'yes'." She took a fortune cookie from the table and cracked it, still in the plastic. "Probably says something, that I said yes to taking you in."

"Some world you live in, " Willow said. "The second you stop believing in it, it'll go away."

"Everyone I know who's broken down?" Lilah said. "Lost it because they couldn't say why they were doing what they did. Control isn't about believing. It's about doing what you want, and making that the world."

"That's how, then," Willow said. "How to keep it stable."

"Keep what stable?"

"I have to make a universe tomorrow," Willow said. "I have to kill Glorificus."

Lilah laughed. "You can't."

"I - what?" Willow said. "It's - it's in the prophecy, right? I kill her."

"You can't kill a god," Lilah said. "The best you can hope to do is incapacitate her thoroughly. I can't believe Lindsey didn't - all right, I can absolutely believe he didn't tell you. But the fact remains."

"Okay," Willow said. "Tomorrow, I'm going to incapacitate her. As much as possible."

"That," Lilah said, "I know you can do." She unwrapped the fortune cookie and crumpled the fortune without looking at it. "Never read them," she said.

*

Willow knew there was a reason she was waiting in the coffee shop for Glorificus. "Look at your arm," Tara said. And obviously, she was waiting there because Ben would be there, and Ben would eventually turn into Glorificus. It was hard to have a plan when parts of it kept falling through the holes in her brain. Also, it was hard to think about saving the world when Tara was licking the whipped cream off her cafe mocha in a way that made Willow wish the whipped cream was on her skin.

Ben was at the counter, ordering, before she noticed him, and by then, Tara was chanting a spell that would bind him to the coffee shop like a dog inside an invisible fence. And then they waited. Willow worried that it would be days, that Glorificus's cycle was longer than she thought. A couple of hours, trying to keep up conversation with Tara while staring at her arm with one eye and looking over her shoulder with the other, and she was ready to call it an apocalypse.

And then there was Ben, stumbling around the tables in a wide, lumpy circle, clutching his head, saying "No, no, not now." 

"Now," Willow said.

Tara got up calmly, her ethereal manner completely unruffled, and pulled the fire alarm. Willow stood up. "Go!" she said. "Everybody go! I'm serious."

Most of the people in the coffee shop had run outside by the time Glorificus rose from behind the counter. She was holding one of the baristas in front of her, cutting off his airway. "You're the one," Glorificus said. "The one from the prophecy. Or did you think I didn't read those?"

"Let me guess," Willow said. "I should let you destroy the fabric between dimensions, or you'll kill that guy?"

"It's so much easier to make the threats when someone else comes up with the wording," Glorificus said.

Willow made a tiny fireball in her hand and tossed it at the hostage. He was burnt to cinders in seconds. If anyone else had been hanging around the coffee shop, they were gone by now. 

"You killed my bargaining chip," Glorificus said. "Now, how is that fair?"

"You're more powerful than me," Willow said. "If I play fair, I lose." 

"You have my key," Glorificus said. "That's not fair, either."

"What key?" Willow said.

"The one you have," Glorificus said.

Willow remembered what Lindsey had said about locking away the thing that Glorificus wanted. "You'll never get to it," Willow said.

"I get what I want," Glorificus said. "In the end, I get what I want."

It was time. She said the magic words she'd wrapped her spell in, the ones Mr. Wyndam-Pryce had given her when she'd stumbled through the Medieval Latin for the umpteenth time. He'd handed her a book of poetry and told her that his research very strongly suggested that the magic was not in the spells' words, but in the power that one instilled in those words. She hoped he was right, because this wasn't the kind of spell she could practice. 

"There's a hell of a good universe next door," Willow said. "Let's go." She encased the coffee shop in unbreakable glass, striated purple. Then, she turned to the fire alarm and commanded it to stop. She knew it was her universe because the alarm obeyed without magic. 

Glorificus looked around her, quizzical at first, then knowing. "Cute little trick," she said. "Now, when I suck your mind out, no one will hear you scream."

"Go ahead," Willow said. "But I'm the only human here, and I'm sustaining the place. Eventually, you'd still have to turn into Ben, and we would both just starve to death. Or suffocate, if I was too crazy to keep making air." 

She realized that she remembered, without the help of her crib notes, that Glorificus was Ben. Neat little universe she had, here.

Glorificus opened the front door of the coffee shop and pounded on the glass that clung to the frame. "I want to _go,"_ she said. "Why won't you let me go?"

"I would," Willow said, "but there's this pesky little prophecy that I figured out how to fulfill. And I thought, well, what's the point of knowing how if you don't actually go out and destroy a goddess?"

"So you're just going to let me go loopy, turn back into Ben, and then you're going to-- what, lop off his head?" Glorificus said. "Effective, but not very heroic."

"I'm not heroic," Willow said. "But I'm patient."

Glorificus adjusted her sparkly dress, marched up to Willow, and punched her in the mouth. Willow's vision went blurry for a few seconds, and the pain brought tears to her eyes. Since her resurrection, she'd never had anything worse than a scrape. "I can't fight you," she said, grabbing a napkin from one of the tables to press against her lip. "You can beat me up until I die, but then you just have that thing again where you've killed the girl who runs the universe."

"This isn't the way it's supposed to go!" Glorificus said, stomping her foot. "There's supposed to be a battle between good and evil, from which I emerge triumphant. I'm insulted."

"No," Willow said. "Just beaten."

The goddess looked fragile, pouting in that minidress and high heels. When Willow had been a vampire, that kind of fragility had turned her on. She'd gone for the delicate and pretty, the ones born to be victims, and then she'd victimized them. She knew that Glorificus's slender white neck was an illusion, a diversion, but it only made her want to hurt Glorificus worse.

"Come here," Willow said.

"No," Glorificus said.

"Then I'll come to you," Willow said. "Did you choose that body so people wouldn't suspect you, or to distract them?"

"I like pretty things," Glorificus said.

"Me too," Willow said. She backed Glorificus towards the wall until there was nowhere else for either of them to go, then reached under her skirt to flick her clit. 

Glorificus sighed. "Stop that," she said.

"I just wanted to see if it worked," Willow said. "I'm inquisitive like that." She flicked Glorificus's clit again. "What does it do? Drain your power? Make you lose control? Because I like both of those outcomes." She tore Glorificus's nylons down to her knees, so easy she thought she might have become a vampire again. She felt her pulse in her neck, and reminded herself that she was just a girl. But a girl whose universe bent to her will, so she might have unconsciously given herself more strength. She'd have to keep an eye on that.

So she was gentle on purpose when she stuck a finger inside Glorificus. Lots of space, so she was up to four, easy, before Glorificus was screaming. With pleasure, probably, but Willow didn't want to know. She could feel the power coursing out of Glorificus: not into herself, just getting loose and disappearing. Glorificus went a little limp, then started thrashing. "Let me out," Glorificus said. "Let me out of this place that smells like burnt jungles - let me - Ooh, there's a pretty mind there, but I can't have it. Can't have it anyway." 

Willow took her fingers out, unsure whether this had worked because of some inherent weakness in Glorificus, or whether she'd just wanted it to work. "Is that what happens?" she said. "You turn into Ben when you start to go crazy."

Glorificus held her head and started to shake it, started shaking all over. And then she was a boy in a dress, on the floor, looking terrified. 

If Ben hadn't bugged Willow so much, it might have been harder to take a long, sharp bagel knife from the kitchen and slit his throat with it before he had time to beg. He gurgled and passed out. The blood glowed faintly, and she realized that leaving remains might not be a good idea. She made another little fireball in her hand and burned him to nothing.

Then, she told the glass to break, and it shattered into tiny purple pieces. It crunched under her boots as she walked out, into the street. A crowd of people, mostly coffee shop regulars, were waiting there, watching. And in a tight, stern-faced group, Lilah and Lindsey, Fred and Mr. Wyndam-Pryce. 

"Very, very incapacitated," Willow said, and she saw Lilah stifle a smile. She scanned the group that had assembled for her. "How did you all know to -"

"Charles is handy with a cellphone," Lindsey said. 

"He knew you'd talked to us about, um, the goddess thing," Fred added. "He said you might need - need backup or something."

"You couldn't have gotten in," Willow said. "It was a closed system."

"Too bad," Fred said. "It would have been neat. To take readings, and - and -"

"Maybe I'll make you another one," Willow said, "when I'm not so tired."

"Save your strength," Mr. Wyndam-Pryce said. "Save it for the next time."

"There's not going to be one," Willow said. Lindsey and Mr. Wyndam-Pryce opened their mouths to argue, but she kept talking. "I'm not a hero. I don't even - I don't even know who I was in there, but I don't think - I don't think I can be that all the time. And I think... I want it to be a while before I die again."

"That's your choice," Lilah said. She shot Lindsey a look that made him suddenly very small. "Stop that. It's her choice. You know that."

Lindsey cleared his throat. "Wolfram & Hart will take care of your welfare and education for the rest of your life, whether you work for us or not. It's part of - it's part of the conditions of our bringing you back. We're responsible for you."

"And you can - you can stay with me as long as you want," Lilah said. "If you want. Which I can't imagine."

"Do you not want me to?" Willow said. "Because I - I don't know where else I'd go."

"I wouldn't mind," Lilah said. "As long as you're quiet and do the dishes." She put her hand on Willow's shoulder. "Do you... want to go home?"

"Where's Tara?" Willow said, looking around until she found her in the crowd.

"You killed the counter guy," Tara said. "Joey. I saw you. You just - killed him. Like - like - like it was nothing." 

"I had to," Willow said. "I had to kill Ben, too. Because - because it was either them, or the whole world, and I decided - I decided the whole world was more important. But that's - that's why I'm never doing this again."

"Never?" Tara said, brightly.

"Not if I have anything to say about it," Willow said. "They said I wouldn't have to." She kissed Tara softly on the lips but felt Lilah's impatient eyes on her. "I'll call you later," Willow said. "But I think now is one of those times when I'm going to go home and realize I need to sleep for a couple of days."

She followed Lilah to the car, already feeling the weariness in her legs. "You know," Lilah said, "two casualties is pretty impressive for averting an apocalypse. Usually, there's hundreds."

"And no more," Willow said. "There won't be any more."


End file.
